The use of prepared mixes for baking cakes has received wide usage, particularly in home baking. So-called "dry" prepared mixes for layer cakes are made by combining sugar, flour, shortening, leavening and other ingredients including perhaps milk solids, egg solids, flavoring and coloring to form a free-flowing granular mixture. To prepare cake batters from these dry mixes for baking, liquid materials such as water, liquid shortening, milk and eggs are added and the combination is then beaten both to form a homogeneous mixture and to incorporate air. The resulting batter is then baked to obtain finished cakes.
Cakes can vary markedly in many respects, including such physical properties as density, grain size and grain size distribution, cell wall thickness, center to edge ratios, total moisture, moisture activity, crumb softness, moisture retentivity, specific volume, center point height, etc. Cakes can also differ markedly in such organoleptic properties as texture, mouthfeel, gumminess and off-tastes. Alteration of the dry mixture formulation to realize cakes differing in any one attribute generally yield concommitant changes, often detrimental, in several other attributes. Thus, dry mix formulations typically must balance increases in a desired cake attribute against undesirable changes in others.
Traditionally, consumers preferred dry mixes which produced cakes having a fine, uniform, thin-walled grain structure and having fine crumbs. The air cells have been small, but numerous and generally evenly distributed throughout the interior of the cake. Such cakes typically have high specific volumes (a type of density). Such cakes are typically prepared from high sugar to flour ratio cake mixes formulated with low protein or "cake" flour and with emulsified shortening. However, consumer taste fashion presently favors higher moistness-impression cakes characteristic of "from scratch" cakes. Such cakes are characterized differently by higher moisture levels and crumb softness but similarly with respect to many other finished cake attributes.
The formulation of culinary mixes for baked goods such as layer cakes for the at-home preparation of layer cakes by conventional overbaking is highly developed. However, present consumer trends for even greater convenience have given rise to desires for culinary mixes for layer cakes to be prepared by microwave baking.
Batters from consumer culinary mixes designed for oven baking can be microwave baked. However, the quality of finished baked goods from microwave baking, e.g., microwave layer cakes can suffer from numerous qualitative deficiencies. For example, when a conventional oven baking dry mix is prepared into a batter and microwave baked, the finished layer cake texture can be finetextured and spongy. Often, specific gravities are much higher. Also, pronounced variations from edge to center are observed. The center can be soggy, more dense, while the edges are overly dry. Rather than a desirable slight peaking in the center (center to edge ratio of about 1.25), even center point depressions can occur (&lt;1.00).
Many deficiencies in finished layer cake quality are caused or aggravated by a fundamental difference in the baking mechanism between oven and microwave baking. In microwave baking, the pan and the solid ingredients, generally, are relatively microwave inert and are not heated while the liquids, especially the moisture, are heated. In direct contrast, in oven baking, the pan and solid structure are heated relatively quickly while the moisture is heated more slowly. Also, microwave energy has a limited depth of penetration. Furthermore, the microwave energy itself interacts with cake ingredients to cause deliterious textural changes in the finished product. As a result, while both oven baking dry mixes and microwave baking mixes will both include flour, sugar, shortening and flavorings, the highly developed formulation technology of oven baking dry mixes provides very little guidance for formulating microwave culinary dry mixes.
The prior art does include compositions and methods for microwave culinary dry mixes which are taught to be useful for microwave baking (see for example, U.S. 4,419,377 entitled Cake Mix Containing a Lipophilic Emulsifier System, issued Dec. 6, 1987 to Seward et al.). Furthermore, consumer dry goods products have recently become commercially available, (see for example, Microwave Chocolate Cake Mix brand layer cake dry mix available from The Pillsbury Co.). While useful, there is a continuing need for new and improved microwave dry mixes useful in the preparation of microwave baked goods. Surprisingly, multiple end product quality attributes are dramatically improved by formulating dry mixes comprising leavening systems which include the present, defined nucleating agents.
The present invention provides improved dry mix compositions and methods for the preparation of microwave baked goods. Surprisingly, multiple end product quality attributes are dramatically improved by formulating dry mixes comprising leavening systems which include defined nucleating agents. The present dry mixes provide the advantages of increased tolerance to variations in the microwave power capacities of the various microwave ovens as well as tolerance to variations in liquids addition. The resultant finished layer cakes of the present invention exhibit smaller differences in volume, grain structure, surface irregularities, crumb moisture and bottom wet spottiness than can occur due to variations in microwave power and/or liquids addition.